page_title: Pharmacopoeia
section_title: City pharmacopoeia origins
hierarchical_section_title: Pharmacopoeia / History / City pharmacopoeia origins
caption_attribution_description: Engraved frontispiece Rare Books
context_page_description: A pharmacopoeia, pharmacopeia, or pharmacopoea, in its modern technical sense, is a book containing directions for the identification of compound medicines, and published by the authority of a government or a medical or pharmaceutical society.
  Descriptions of preparations are called monographs. In a broader sense it is a reference work for pharmaceutical drug specifications.
context_section_description: The first known work of this kind published under civic authority appears to have been that of Tang Dynasty in China. The treatise was written by several officials of Emperor Gaozong of Tang. The pharmacopoeia contained 850 sorts of crude medicine, revising the treatises written by ancient Chinese pharmacists.
  However, the first dated work appeared in Nuremberg in 1542; a passing student Valerius Cordus showed a collection of medical prescriptions, which he had selected from the writings of the most eminent medical authorities, to the physicians of the town, who urged him to print it for the benefit of the apothecaries, and obtained for his work the sanction of the senatus. A work known as the Antidotarium Florentinum, was published under the authority of the college of medicine of Florence in the 16th century. In 1511, the Concordie Apothecariorum Barchinone was published by the Society of Apothecaries of Barcelona and kept in the School of Pharmacy of the University of Barcelona.
  The term Pharmacopoeia first appears as a distinct title in a work published at Basel, Switzerland, in 1561 by A. Foes, but does not appear to have come into general use until the beginning of the 17th century.
  Before 1542 the works principally used by apothecaries were the treatises on simples by Avicenna and Serapion; the De synonymis and Quid pro quo of Simon Januensis; the Liber servitoris of Bulchasim Ben Aberazerim, which described the preparations made from plants, animals, and minerals, and was the type of the chemical portion of modern pharmacopoeias; and the Antidotarium of Nicolaus de Salerno, containing Galenic formulations arranged alphabetically. Of this last work, there were two editions in use — Nicolaus magnus and Nicolaus parvus: in the latter, several of the compounds described in the large edition were omitted and the formulae given on a smaller scale.
  Also  Vesalius claimed he had written  some "dispensariums" and "manuals" on the works of Galenus. Apparently he burnt them. According to  recent research communicated at the congresses of the  International Society for the History of Medicine by the scholar Francisco Javier González Echeverría, Michel De Villeneuve(Michael Servetus) also published a  pharmacopeia. Michel De Villeneuve, fellow student of Vesalius and the best galenist of Paris according to Johann Winter von Andernach, published the anonymous " ''Dispensarium or Enquiridion" in 1543, at Lyon, France, with Jean Frellon as editor. This work contains 224 original recipes by Michel De Villeneuve(Michael Servetus) and others by Lespleigney and Chappuis. As usual when it comes to pharmacopeias, this work was  complementary  to a previous Materia Medica that Michel De Villeneuve published that same year. This finding was communicated by the same scholar in the International Society for the History of Medicine, with agreement of John M. Riddle, one of the foremost experts on Materia Medica-Dioscorides works.
  Nicolaes Tulp, mayor of Amsterdam and respected surgeon general, gathered all of his doctor and chemist friends together and they wrote the first pharmacopoeia of Amsterdam in 1636 Pharmacopoea Amstelredamensis. This was a combined effort to improve public health after an outbreak of the plague, and also limit the number of quack apothecary shops in Amsterdam.
caption: Engraved frontispiece of the 1703 Pharmacopoeia Bateana
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